The Regional Meteorological Centre Mumbai declared the onset of monsoon in Mumbai on last Friday. Over the last weekend as the rains hit several parts of Mumbai, Twitter was bursting with tweets about the onset of the rains. A good news for the market, farmers and the common man but at the same Mumbai rains are known to create havoc in the city.

From traffic mess to increase in road accidents, the common man has to fight it out for the next 4-5 months. While the administration is gearing up to face the uphill task, tyre companies like MRF are coming forward to connect with their consumers in smarter ways.

Monsoons have always been a big opportunity for MRF as the company has been predicting and preparing Mumbaikars for the last three decades. However this year the company took a drift from the business of predicting rains. This year along with its brand ambassador and cricketing legend Sachin Tendulkar, the company has initiated promotions for special monsoon friendly tyres exclusively designed by MRF. The tyres are tested to provide extra grip and protection during the monsoon season on wet roads.

MRF Smart Cloud

Prior to the launch of the advertising campaign, MRF took the digital route to create buzz and connect with the millennials of Mumbai. With predictions running high that monsoons could hit Mumbai by mid June, the brand in association with its digital agency Experience Commerce, launched a self-tweeting smart cloud with #MRFRainDay – a smart cloud that answers all doubts about the rain while you win and have fun asking questions.

On the face of it is a geeky smart cloud looking more like a UFO that has just come out from a sci-fi Hollywood movie. The moment you enter the portal (http://www.mrftyres.com/rainday/) a theme song starts playing while the smart cloud is waiting for you to ask questions. If you don’t know what to ask the smart chap then select the listed hashtags which are enough to throw some ideas.

Interesting questions won goodies and vouchers from MRF. Listed below are some of the wittiest replies from the MRF Smart Cloud.

The microsite also hosts some very important monsoon tips for those who drive four-wheelers, repository of witty smart cloud conversations and a way to get more info about MRF tyres for the monsoon.

Integrating social media to #MRFRainDay

To create buzz around the #MRFRainDay, social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter were used. From urging fans to ask smart questions to the smart cloud to sharing the theme song, the brand did its best to initiate participation. With fans downloading the theme song, MRF planned to cash in from the growing craze of Dubsmash. Fans were asked to create a Dubsmash video on the theme song and if lucky they had a chance to win an MRF bat autographed by Sachin.

MRF Smart Cloud was not only making waves on digital but it also moved around popular shopping malls of Mumbai to reach out to a wider audience. The portal had the details of its movement, social media also featured updates with the various offline movements of MRF Smart Cloud.

With monsoons finally hitting Mumbai extensively on 15th June, the digital campaign for 2015 has also come to an end.

Smart cloud with a smart integration

MRF Tyres, until last year, was in the business of predicting monsoons. Earlier the focus was on traditional advertising but in 2014 it trusted digital. The campaign idea was not only to predict the rains, but also show the epic journey of the South West monsoon as it makes its way from Kerala to Mumbai.

A dedicated microsite was designed that kept a track of the rain clouds starting from Kochi in Kerala from the 3rd of June as it moved through Chembra hills, Mysore, Kodagu, Mangalore, Goa and Maharashtra day after day to finally make it to the city on the predicted 12th.

Over the years predicting the monsoons has become a tough challenge for the Meteorological Department, so this year MRF drifted from the predicting business and instead stressed on the fact that it is a tech company.

“This year MRF wanted to stay clear from predicting the rain but at the same time it wanted to bring the imagery of a smart tech company as it has been investing ample resources in this area. Keeping that in mind we did the MRF Smart Cloud which is powered by Raspberry Pi and interfaced to three different sensors including a camera. Either you can talk to the cloud virtually or in offline at certain malls of Mumbai,” said Sandip Maiti, CEO at Experience Commerce.

Building an interactive smart cloud online as well as offline is proof that MRF has a tech mindset and at the same time is making it easy for the common man to understand. Even though the interactivity was automated, the answers were witty. At the same time it has been a big learning curve for the agency which has tried to bridge the gap between creativity and tech.

“The challenge was to integrate real time photography. Pulling out instant pictures from Twitter was a bit of a challenge but we managed it. For us this is the first time where we have taken the MRF Rain Day digital property on-ground while keeping the wires connected to digital. This is the age of interesting conversations, to meet that we programmed interesting responses which was a great learning curve for us.”

In fact showcasing conversations on the desktop is state of the art – a hive of conversations is circulating, you hover on them to read through it. A technology that finds its inspiration from Google, informs Sandip.

Social media was used as an enabler to promote the MRF Smart Cloud with interesting touch points. The use of Dubsmash, which is quite a craze among the millennials, with the theme song and gratifying witty questions adds up to the smart and sensible execution of the digital campaign.

A geeky, smart campaign yet an interesting one; nothing is over the top and rightly fits in the shoes of tech savvy millennials.